Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   U   —

UAPA
See: UNLAWFUL ACTIVITIES PREVENTION ACT

UKRAINIAN COMMUNIST PARTY [UKAPISTS]
An opposition party to the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine from 1920 to 1925. The nickname “Ukapists” comes from the Anglicized Ukrainian initials of this party, UKP. The Ukapists were a split-off from the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party in January 1919, and initially called themselves the Socialists-Sovereignists. They had a strong nationalistic orientation, though they did favor some type of an alliance with other Soviet republics in a sort of European socialist federation. In its newspaper Chervony Prapor the UCP strongly criticized the Ukrainian Bolsheviks as being subservient to the Russian Bolsheviks in Moscow.
        Besides their initial Sovereignist core the Ukapists included many former left-Socialist Revolutionary Borotbists, and some people, such as Yuri Lapchinsky, who had left the CP(B)U for nationalist reasons. In 1923 a faction of the UCP requested unification with the Bolshevik party. In 1920 and again in 1924 the UCP asked the Communist International for affiliation as the representative of Ukraine. The Comintern rejected this application and said that since Ukraine was already a sovereign state within the USSR, the UCP should dissolve itself and merge into the CP(B)U. At its Fourth Congress the UCP did formally dissolve itself, and some members, including its leader Andri Richitsky, did join the CP(B)U. During the early 1930s at least some of the former Ukapists were purged from the Bolsheviks, and some were apparently exiled to Siberia or else executed.

ULTIMATUMISTS
See: OTZOVISM

UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
See: HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

UNCONSCIOUS, The
        1. The active mental processes (or high-level characterizations of the functioning of the brain) which are outside the range of the subject’s awareness. This includes the brain processes that occur when a person performs routine tasks “without thinking about them”, such as walking, or driving a car while thinking about something else. But it may also be said to include similar sorts of characterizations of brain processing which people are normally incapable of being consciously aware of. Thus we may be aware that we have recognized somebody’s face, but we are not aware of the precise complex processing in the brain that allows us to actually do this. In this sense, most of the processing that the brain does is unconscious.
        2. [In Freudian and similar types of psychoanalysis:] The part of the mind (or “psychic apppartus”) that does not ordinarily enter the individual’s awareness, and which is repressed, but which may be manifested indirectly by slips of the tongue, otherwise inexplicable actions, or in dreams, and which can supposedly be brought into conscious awareness through psychotherapy. The unconscious, in such theories, refers to “psychic activity” which concentrates eternal and immutable motives and desires, including taboo sexual and domination wishes. However, there is little or no scientific evidence that the “unconscious” actually exists in this Freudian sense. It is just a wild hypothesis of pseudoscientific psychoanalytical theory.
        See also: SUBCONSCIOUS

UNDERCONSUMPTIONISM
One of a number of basic theories in the Marxist milieu for what causes capitalist economic crises. Marx called these events “overproduction crises”, though he actually put forward at least three different explanations for them—overproduction (or underconsumption), the anarchy of capitalist production, and the falling rate of profit theory). (And the followers of Marx have constructed even more crisis theories besides those three.)
        Underconsumption is just another way of looking at overproduction; they are two sides of the same coin. Underconsumption is in relation to what the masses of the people actually need and want, and results from their not having enough money to buy those commodities. Overproduction is in relation to the real market demand (and not in relation to what people need and want!), but likewise results from people not having the money to buy all the things that are produced which they do in fact need and want.
        Some of the early bourgeois theorists of underconsumption (such as Rodbertus, but including even Sismondi, the best of them) put forward undeveloped and often quite naive theories that tended to discredit this type of explanation for capitalist economic crises. In particular, many of them thought that simply raising wages would prevent such crises. (It is actually impossible for the capitalists to raise wages to that degree; they would go broke! In any case, they are definitely unwilling to even give it a try!) Furthermore, because of the multifaceted explanations which Marx himself gave for crises, even many Marxists do not understand that his central, and most essential, explanation was in fact a much more sophisticated form of underconsumption/overproduction theory than bourgeois economists like Rodbertus put forward. Hence the name he used for the phenomenon! Most of us defenders of the “underconsumption” theory of crises follow Marx and instead refer to them as “overproduction crises”. Consequently the term “underconsumptionism” is used mostly by opponents of overproduction theories of capitalist economic crises.
        It should also be noted that Marx’s theory of overproduction focuses primarily not on the excess consumer commodities themselves (which are produced relative to the market demand), but rather the excess capital that is created which in turn can be used to produce so many “excess” commodities. In other words Marx is focusing on the overproduction of capital, rather than the overproduction of consumer commodities. This also explains why the term “overproduction” is superior to “underconsumption” in his theory.
        See also below and: OVERPRODUCTION CRISES

UNDERCONSUMPTIONISM — Marx’s Supposed Rejection Of
There are a great many statements in Marx’s Capital, and in his other writings (including Theories of Surplus Value), in which he makes clear that his basic theory of capitalist economic crises is the Overproduction Theory. And, indeed, Marx even calls these crises by the name overproduction crises. However, as the introductory entry on UNDERCONSUMPTIONISM above notes, there are two competing crisis theories in Marx’s writings: the anarchy theory and the falling rate of profit theory. Those who favor one or the other of these theories instead of the overproduction theory prefer to call that theory “underconsumptionism”. And they have scoured Marx’s writings looking for the slightest clue that he also rejected “underconsumptionism”. They’ve found very few such statements, and even those are totally misconstrued. The specific passage from Marx which has been cited most often is the following from volume II of Capital:

“It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system does not know any other modes of consumption than effective ones, except that of sub forma pauperis [in the form of the pauper] or of the swindler. That commodities are unsaleable means only that no effective purchasers have been found for them, i.e., consumers (since commodities are bought in the final analysis for productive or individual consumption). But if one were to attempt to give this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification by saying that the working-class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption. From the point of view of these advocates of sound and ‘simple’ (!) common sense, such a period should rather remove the crisis. It appears, then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.” —Marx, Capital, Vol. II, chapter 20, part 4, (International ed., pp. 410-411; Penguin ed., pp. 486-487.)

First of all, just who is Marx criticizing here? Engels, who edited volume II, comments in a footnote to this paragraph that “possible followers of the Rodbertian theory of crises” should take note of this passage. So we immediately see that Marx’s comments were directed against naïve underconsumptionists such as Rodbertus, and not at all against the whole notion that underconsumption by the masses is a central aspect of capitalist crises.
        In fact, Marx makes it absolutely clear that underconsumption is indeed central to crises in the first sentence in the above passage where he says that “It is a sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers.” Several times over the years I’ve heard people quote that sentence as part of their attacks on “underconsumptionism”. I’ve often wondered—do these people even know what a tautology is? To say that something is a tautology is definitely not to say that it is false, as some of these people seem to think! But it is true that Marx wanted to emphasize here that the forced underconsumption by the masses is by no means the whole story—that though it is certainly true, there are also other contradictions involved in crises.
        There is another critical sentence in the above passage which I’ll repeat, but this time with the key part of it—the part that is unaccountably neglected by many—put in bold type: “But if one were to attempt to give this tautology the semblance of an profounder justification by saying that the working-class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption.”
        It should be clear once again here that Marx is by no means denying that crises are in fact ultimately caused by the fact that the working class receives wages which cover only a part of the value which they create. But his point is that the complexities of the contradictions involved in crises, and the complicated way they develop, means that simply raising wages cannot possibly prevent crises from breaking out. This is true for any number of reasons. It is true because even if wages are raised, workers will still be exploited (though to a lesser degree). Capitalism cannot continue without the continuous extraction of surplus value from the workers. But more to the immediate point, it is also true because crises are postponed by means of the expansion of credit—consumer credit, government deficits, and so forth. So when these financial bubbles pop we have a crisis—even though wages are typically increasing at the time. To imagine that crises can be prevented by simply raising workers wages—even by raising them substantially—is in large part to fail to understand all the many additional contradictions at work on top of the most basic contradictions.
        Marx’s point—in emphasizing that wages usually rise in the period just before crises break out—is that simple-minded crisis theories which recognize only that the consumption of the masses is forcibly restricted are completely inadequate. It’s not that Rodbertus was wrong about this basic point; on the contrary he was entirely correct about it. But this much is totally obvious; it is a “mere tautology.” What Rodbertus and others like him could not do was work out the full story, and explain all the additional mechanisms at work which both prevent crises for a time, but then inevitably lead to their sudden outbreak just when it seems the capitalist economy will fly forward unimpeded forever.
        I should also add here that while what Marx says in the above passage is certainly true, it is a bit misleading in another way. A substantial increase in the real wages of the workers—either through actual wage raises, or a fall in consumer prices, or a cut in workers’ taxes—can in fact help to postpone or possibly somewhat mitigate the severity of a crisis. But just as extending the workers more credit can only ward off the crisis to some degree and/or for a limited period of time, the same is true of any real increase in wages. Eventually a crisis will break out in any case because none of these things truly resolves the underlying contradiction—that the workers are still being paid for only part of what they produce and therefore cannot possibly buy back all of it. No increase in wages—no matter how great—can permanently prevent a new crisis from developing. If the capitalists were suddenly to all go crazy and to actually try to pay the workers enough to buy an equivalent amount to what they produce then the capitalists themselves would soon go broke and the entire system would collapse. —S.H. [From a section of my work in progress, An Introductory Explanation of Capitalist Economic Crises].

U-3 Series: “Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate).”
         U-6 Series: “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.”
         Marginally attached to the labor force: “are those who currently are neither working nor [currently] looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months.”
         Discouraged workers are “a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work.”
         Persons employed part time for economic reasons “are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.” —From the notes to each month’s BLS Unemployment Report.
         [Note that every one of these “definitions” distorts the truth. U-3 is not at all the “total unemployed” (as they go on to tacitly admit themselves!); U-6 does not include all those who would work if jobs were actually available; “discouraged workers” actually excludes a large number of those who really are discouraged about finding work; and so forth. Even the BLS’s definition of the size of the labor force itself seriously distorts things (and tries to make the unemployment situation look much better than it is) by simply not counting millions of unemployed people as being in the labor force at all! —S.H.]

[Refer to the graph at the right.] “The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.” —John Williams, on his Shadow Government Statistics website at http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts

See also: COMPUTERS—and Unemployment

“The Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad was founded in 1894 in Geneva, on the initiative of the Emancipation of Labor group. The latter was at first the leader in it and edited its publications; but afterwards the opportunist elements—the Economist ‘younger group’—secured the upper hand. At the Union’s First Congress in November 1898 the Emancipation of Labor Group refused to edit the Union publications; and at the Second Congress, in April 1900, it broke with the Union finally, withdrawing with its supporters from the Congress to establish an independent organization called Sotsial-Demokrat.” —Note 5, LCW 7.

UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS (USSR, or SOVIET UNION)
[To be added... ]
        See also: COUNCIL FOR MUTUAL ECONOMIC AID

UNIT LABOR COSTS
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines unit labor costs as the ratio of hourly compensation to labor productivity. Increases in hourly compensation tend to increase unit labor costs and increases in output per hour (productivity) tend to reduce them.

UNITY OF OPPOSITES   [Dialectics]
        See also: CONTRADICTION—Dialectical, DIALECTICS, ONE-INTO-TWO

“Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. This law operates universally, whether in the natural world, in human society, or in man’s thinking. Between the opposites in a contradiction there is at once unity and struggle, and it is this that impels things to move and change. Contradictions exist everywhere, but they differ in accordance with the different nature of different things. In any given phenomenon or thing, the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and transitory, and hence relative, whereas the struggle of opposites is absolute.” —Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” (Feb. 27, 1957), SW 5:392.

UNIVERSAL RIGHTS OF MAN, The
The principles in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” which was proclaimed during the time of the great French Revolution of 1789-93.

UNIVERSALS (vs. PARTICULARS or INDIVIDUALS)   [Philosophy]
Universals are abstractions (abstract concepts), which are usually generalizations derived from particulars (such as individual material things) which have a physical existence in the world.
        There is a long tradition in idealist philosophy, going back at least to Plato, in arguing that in addition to the specific material objects in the world there also actually exist (perhaps even in some “deeper” sense!) abstract entities which embody the “idea” or “form” of a given sort of object. For example, according to this idealist conception, in addition to all the actual chairs in the world there also exists the idea of “chair” (or “chairness”) which is just as much a part of reality as are all the specific chairs. But while that idealist conception that ideas are on an existential (or ontological) par with material objects is total nonsense, it is a fact that we do have the abstract concept of a chair, and that abstract concept is different from (and not identical to) any specific chair. (If some particular chair that is extremely similar to our concept of a chair is destroyed, for example, our concept of a chair is still not in any way destroyed.)
        Philosophers, therefore, have long discussed the relationship between universals and particulars (or individual things), and idealist and metaphysical philosophers have often been very confused and mystified by this relationship. The central difficulty here comes from an inadequate understanding and analysis of what abstraction is. However, to deeply understand the nature of abstraction itself, one must apply materialist dialectics. It appears to me that Lenin was making an attempt in this direction in the following, though it is not certain that everyone will find this helpful (since the discussion itself is quite abstract):

“To begin with what is the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., with any proposition: the leaves of a tree are green; John is a man; Fido is a dog, etc. Here already we have dialectics (as Hegel’s genius recognized): the individual is the universal...
         [Lenin then quotes a passage in German and Greek about the views of Aristotle on this subject. The English translation of that passage is: “For, of course, one cannot hold the opinion that there can be a house (in general) apart from visible houses.”]
         “Consequently, the opposites (the individual is opposed to the universal) are identical: the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes), etc. Here already we have the elements, the germs, the concepts of necessity, of objective connection in nature, etc. Here already we have the contingent and the necessary, the phenomenon and the essence...” —Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics” (1915), LCW 38:361. [This is from a rough manuscript that Lenin did not have a chance to prepare for publication during his lifetime.]

UNLAWFUL ACTIVITIES PREVENTION ACT (UAPA)
A fascist law passed by the central government of India in 2008 which gives the police and other authorities almost a completely free hand to suppress ideas and social movements which the ruling class dislikes. It is especially aimed at the revolutionary movement, and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in particular.
        For further information see the Indian Fascism page on BANNEDTHOUGHT.NET at: http://www.bannedthought.net/India/Fascism/index.htm

UNPRODUCTIVE LABOR
[To be added...]
        See also: PRODUCTIVE LABOR

UPPER PALEOLITHIC (LATE PALEOLITHIC)
The European pre-historical period from about 35,000 to 11,000 years ago. The Upper Paleolithic and first part of the Neolithic are generally divided into six principle cultural periods (which overlap somewhat): The Chatelperonian (35,000-30,000 years ago); the Aurignacian (34,000-30,000); the Gravettian (30,000-22,000); the Solutrean (22,000-18,000); the Magdelenian (18,000-11,000); and the Azilian (11,000-9,000). [Roger Lewin, In the Age of Mankind (1988), pp. 145-6.]
        See also: PALEOLITHIC

USE VALUE
[Sometimes with a hyphen.] 1. An item which is useful or meets a need or satisfies a desire that someone has. (Marx generally uses the term in this sense.)
2. The characteristic(s) of an item that makes it useful or allows it to meet a need.
        “Whatever its social form may be, wealth always consists of use-values...” —Marx, CCPE, pp. 27-8. “The use-value of a commodity is the basis of its exchange-value and thus of its value.” —Marx, Capital, vol. III, Part VI, Ch. 37: (International, p. 636; Penguin, p. 774.)
        See also: VALUE, EXCHANGE VALUE

UTILITARIANISM
1. Any of a large number of ethical theories, most of which are now varieties of hedonism, and therefore focus on “happiness” and “pain”.
2. [Originally, and logically:] The ethical theory that goodness and morality derive from utility or usefulness. Marxist-Leninist Class Interest Ethics has developed from these roots. (See next entry below.)
        See also: Philosophical Doggerel on utilitarianism.

UTOPIAN COMMUNE (or COMMUNITY)
A small community of utopian socialists who come together to equalize their labor and share the wealth that they collectively produce. Some of the most notable of these communities were established by the early 19^th century utopian socialists such as Robert Owen. Many utopian communes were set up by various religious sects. In modern times utopian communes are few and far between, and are very small and essentially inconsequential as far as participating in any way in the progressive social transformation of society as a whole.
        The most extensive and economically successful (for a time) system of utopian communes has been the kibbutzim in Israel, which were set up from both collectivist impulses and in order to more effectively steal the land away from the Palestinian people. This shows just how terribly reactionary a programme of creating utopian communes can sometimes be.

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